He finds it uncanny. The involuntary repetition, experiencing the exact same unwelcome scenario over and over again, kind of like standing in a dark laboratory week after week, dissecting fish after fish only to find something other than you expected. “I was glad enough to abandon my exploratory walk and get straight back to the piazza I had left a short while before.”
He is, in all likeliness, writing about Trieste. He described similar, dreamlike walks in his letters to Eduard Silberstein during his 1876 visit, when he unsuccessfully tried to find the eel’s testicles. The same narrow alleys and painted women watching him from the windows. It appears, then, that what came to mind when Freud himself tried to capture the unique feeling of unease and intellectual uncertainty was his frustrating and enigmatic weeks in Trieste. And surely it’s not too far-fetched to think the eel played on his mind, because what has it been throughout history—in literature and art, as well as in its hidden existence just beneath the surface—if not uncanny? If not unheimlich?
12
To Kill an Animal
I remember Dad down by the stream, against a backdrop of moonlight and the soft rushing of the rapids, with reeds sticking out of the water like dark antennae behind him. He was standing at the bottom of the bank, just by the water’s edge, clutching an eel. It was small, too small to take home and eat, really. But, as eels are prone to do, it had swallowed the hook so completely that it had disappeared down its throat; Dad was squeezing the eel, trying to jiggle the hook loose, but it kept writhing around his arm, up over his wrist, which was shiny with slime, and the hook refused to come out. Dad hissed, softly through gritted teeth: “You bastard.”
As I watched, unease grew inside me. That thick slime, almost impossible to wash off, clinging to the skin of his arm and clothes like stinking glue. The eel’s tiny button eyes, which seemed to stare at me but never returned my gaze. The slow movements, the body arching like a flexed muscle, twisting around its own axis until its white underbelly shimmered in the moonlight.
Dad squeezed the eel even harder, yanked at the line and tried to pry its jaw open, but it bit down hard and continued to writhe in his grasp, resisting sluggishly. Blood was dripping from the eel’s mouth; Dad frowned and said, even more softly: “Bloody let go already. You bastard!” His words may have been aggressive, but his tone slowly changed, becoming gentle, pleading, almost tender. He shook his head. “No, it’s not working.” And I handed him the knife, the long fishing knife whose blade had been whetted so many times it was thin as a reed, and he squatted, held the eel against the ground, and firmly pushed the point of the knife through its head.
Dad liked animals a lot. All kinds of animals. He liked being in nature, by the stream or in the forest; he read books about animals and watched nature shows on television; he liked horses and dogs, and seeing an unusual wild animal made him very excited. Sometimes we went bird-watching. Just him and me with one pair of binoculars between us. We walked around aimlessly, passing the binoculars back and forth whenever we spotted a kite or a woodpecker. We didn’t keep a log of the species we saw; it was never a sport to us. We just liked looking at birds.
He was fascinated by all the strange and wonderful forms life took. He told me about the bats down by the river, how they navigated using sonar. “They can’t see a thing, barely as far as their own noses, but they let out these high-pitched squeaks that we can’t even hear, and then they listen for the echo; when it comes bouncing back, they know straightaway if there’s a mosquito or a tree trunk in front of them. It takes a fraction of a second.”
Sometimes we heard rustling in the tall, wet grass and saw a frightened grass snake slip into the stream and swim away, its yellow spots like glimmering lanterns on its head. Sometimes we spotted a heron standing on the opposite bank, its neck bent like a fishing hook and its giant beak pointed down at whatever was hiding under the surface.
Dad told me about the mink that lived by the stream. A small, slender, almost entirely black creature that crept along the water’s edge at night. At least that’s what he said. I’d never seen it and wasn’t sure Dad had either. But sometimes we would find half-eaten fish in the grass. “Must be the mink,” Dad would offer.
He said they were lovely animals, but also crafty and dangerous, maybe not to us, but to the stream and the reason we visited it—the fish and the eel. “It kills for sport,” he told me. He said the mink goes for mice and frogs and fish, definitely, and that it doesn’t stop until it’s killed everything in its path. Every time it runs into another life-form, it has to kill it. It’s in its nature. It was an intruder, not just by our stream, but in the very ecosystem. It would be capable of emptying the stream of eels pretty much single-handedly. It fell to us to put things right.
So Dad built a trap. It was a simple, rectangular wooden box, maybe three feet long, with an opening at one end and some kind of trip lock meant to make sure the mink couldn’t get out once it was inside. We baited the trap with a dead roach and placed it by the water’s edge, at the bottom of the steep bank. Then we left it overnight while we fished for eels.
The next morning, we crept through the wet grass toward the trap as silently as we could. On the lookout for any sign of movement, listening for the sounds of the animal that was almost certain to be inside. But the trap was empty. The roach was still there, untouched. And that was how it always turned out, every time we set the trap, in many different spots along the stream. A single, reeking roach, left untouched. Not once did we see the faintest sign of the mink ever having been near it.
In time, I started doubting whether the mink was real, but more than anything I was relieved I didn’t have to encounter it. Because what would we have really done if we’d caught a mink? I suppose Dad would’ve killed it. But how? With his bare hands? Or a knife? Would he have submerged the whole trap in the stream and drowned it? A small, slender, beautiful animal with bright eyes and soft, shiny fur. Was it right to kill an animal like that? It felt foreign, an act completely different from killing a roach or an eel.
WHAT MAKES A HUMAN DIFFERENT FROM AN ANIMAL? I KNEW NOTHING about that. The only thing I knew was that there was a difference and that it was irrevocable and immutable. A human is something other than an animal.
Eventually, I also came to understand that in addition to there being a difference between humans and animals, there’s also a difference among different kinds of animals. That boundary was even more vague and less defined. The difference seemed to be less about the nature of the animals than about our perception of them. If you looked at an animal and saw something of yourself in it, you inevitably felt closer to it. That didn’t mean killing any animal was easy, or that it should have been easy, just that there was a difference among different animals. Apparently, that was how human empathy worked. An animal looking you in the eye, you can identify with. That animal is harder to kill.
Dad liked animals a lot, but sometimes he killed them. It wasn’t something he enjoyed, he took no pleasure in the violence, but he did what he thought was right. He’d been raised to believe humans have not only the upper hand and the power over other forms of life, but also a kind of responsibility. To let live or let die. It wasn’t always clear how to handle this responsibility, or when it was right to do one thing or the other, but it was nevertheless a responsibility that was impossible to shirk. And it was a responsibility that required a certain level of respect. Respect for the animal, for life itself, but also respect for our responsibility for it.
He kept a shotgun at home. It sat in a closet, locked to the back; he rarely used it. Once or twice a year, he would go hunting with some men I didn’t know. They left in the early hours of the morning, dressed in thick, baggy jackets and green hunting caps. Sometimes he came back holding a dead hare by its hind legs, limp and bloodstained. Sometimes he brought a couple of pheasants. But he seldom seemed to have shot them himself. He always said someone else had held the gun. He said he didn’t like shooting the animals if they were standing still.
A hare, flicking its ear, oblivious to the danger. A stock dove cooing in a tree. He stood there and took aim, but couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger.
But he did shoot our cat Oskar. That much I know. It was a fat and none-too-companionable black-and-white tom that spent most of the day sleeping on a sofa but slunk out the door every night, not to return until morning. Eventually he grew old and sick and tired, and one morning he was gone and I didn’t really give it a second thought. Mum and Dad said he’d run away. Maybe he’d been run over by a car. I found out only much later that Dad had in fact killed him. He’d shot Oskar with his shotgun. Because he felt it was the right thing to do.
He tried to shoot Nana’s cat, too. It was old and sick and tired as well; Dad took it into the woods to put it out of its misery. He managed to wrestle both the cat and the rifle into the trunk and then drove to a small clearing deep in the forest. Just as he pulled up, he spotted a covey of partridges at the edge of the trees. It was rare to get so close, and his gun was loaded and ready in the back. So he crept around the car carefully, tentatively opened the trunk with one hand and stuck the other inside to pull out the gun without letting the cat escape. But in that moment, the cat—the old and sick and tired cat—somehow got a second wind. Like a dark blur, it streaked out of the open trunk, dashing between the trees, straight toward the covey of partridges. And as the cat disappeared without a trace in the forest, the partridges took flight and raced, terrified, in the opposite direction. And Dad was left standing by the car, rifle in hand. Careless. A failure. He never saw that cat again.
MY FATHER’S VIEWS ON HUMANS AND ANIMALS, AND THE DIFFERENCE between them, had, of course, been with him since childhood. They were considered self-evident, indisputable. For me, it was never so clear cut.
Dad had grown up on a farm and had, since he was a small boy, helped keep the stable free of mice and rats. He’d caught them with his hands and killed them quickly and without fuss by throwing them hard against the stable wall. He’d seen chickens beheaded and kittens drowned. He’d been present when his father slaughtered pigs. He’d seen the pig get anesthetized and seen its throat cut and its blood drained. He’d learned how to scald its skin with boiling water so the thick bristles could be scrubbed off, and how the body was subsequently cut up, turning the living creature into chunks of meat.
As he got older, he continued to help with the slaughter, and once, he brought me with him. I might have been ten at the time. We left at the crack of dawn; when we got to his parents’ the stable door was open and I caught a glimpse of the big tub full of steaming water inside, the knives and brushes on the floor, Grandad leading the pig, a large, pliant animal, up. I was excited and possibly a little bit scared; Dad must’ve noticed, because as we were about to head in and set to work, he turned to me and said: “Actually, I think it would be better if you went inside with Nana.”
There was a graveness in his voice that surprised me, and I felt a pang of humiliation and disappointment. But when he stepped into the stable and closed the door behind him, leaving me alone in the yard, I was, more than anything, relieved.
Early one morning a few days later, we were down by the stream, pulling out our spillers. It was late summer and already warm, and the tall grass was dry and crackly. Big, heavy dragonflies hovered around our heads, and the stream flowed unusually calmly and contentedly through the rapids. I stood at the bottom of the bank, near the willow tree. Dad was about three feet away; we noticed one of our nylon lines was taut like a violin string. When I touched it, I could feel it vibrating; I grabbed it and was greeted by that familiar, undulating resistance. “It’s an eel,” I said out loud.
It was a fairly large one, with a dark brown back and shiny white belly; I held it firmly right behind the head and studied the fishing line disappearing into its clenched jaws. It writhed around my arm like a thick rope being tightened, all the way up to my elbow, then it suddenly let go and slapped me in the face with its tail. Thick slime covered my cheek. The smell of fish and the past and brackish seawater.
I fumbled its mouth open and saw that the line continued down its throat. The hook was buried deep; I couldn’t even see the loop. I spent a few minutes jiggling the line, pulling and yanking and trying to stick my fingers far enough down its throat to grab the hook, until I heard a soft, wet crunching sound and blood started pouring out of the eel’s mouth.
“It swallowed the hook,” I said. “Could you take it?”
Dad bent closer and studied the eel.
“Poor little thing,” he said. “It’s in there good, isn’t it? Now, why would you do that?”
Then he straightened up and looked at me again. “No, you take it. You can handle it.”
13
Under the Sea
Despite the contradictory feeling the eel arouses, up close, in its natural habitat, it gives the impression of being fairly jovial. It rarely puts on airs. It doesn’t cause a scene. It eats what its surroundings offer. It stays on the sidelines, demanding neither attention nor appreciation.
The eel is different from, for instance, the salmon, which sparkles and shimmers and makes wild dashes and daring jumps. The salmon comes off as a self-absorbed, vain fish. The eel seems more content. It doesn’t make a big deal of its existence.
And thus the eel is in a more fundamental way the opposite of the salmon. Both are migrating fish, both live in both fresh and saltwater and both undergo metamorphoses, but their life cycles differ in their most essential aspect.
The salmon is a so-called anadromous fish. It breeds in freshwater and its offspring swim out to sea after about a year, spending most of their lives there. After just a few years (the salmon clearly doesn’t possess the patience of the eel), the sexually mature salmon swims back up into fresh water and procreates.
The eel, for its part, makes a similar journey, but in the opposite direction. It is a so-called catadromous fish that lives its life in freshwater but breeds in saltwater.
Another, more subtle, indefinable detail also sets them apart. When the salmon wanders back up rivers and waterways, it always returns to the spot where its parents reproduced. Every salmon quite literally walks in its ancestors’ footsteps. Somehow, it knows that’s where it has to go. A salmon can live a free and unrestrained life in the sea, but eventually it will return to the place of its birth and join the community it was destined for. This means there are clear genetic differences among salmon populations from different waters. The salmon is, so to speak, biologically tied to its origin. It doesn’t allow existential transgressions.
The eel, of course, also finds its way back to its birthplace—Sargasso, ho!—but once it reaches this vast sea, it encounters eels from all across Europe and breeds indiscriminately. Origin to an eel is not about family or biological belonging, it’s simply a location. And afterward, when the tiny willow leaf drifts toward the coasts of Europe and turns into a glass eel, it chooses a waterway to wander up seemingly at random. Where it spends its adult life apparently has nothing to do with previous generations of eels; why a particular eel chooses a particular river remains a mystery. This means the genetic variation among eels in different parts of Europe is negligible. Every eel seeks its place in the world without a guide, without inheritance or heritage and existentially alone.
Perhaps the eel’s fate is easier to identify with than the salmon’s predestined lack of independence. And perhaps that’s why the eel, with its enigmatic remoteness, remains such a fascinating creature. Because it’s easier to relate to someone who has secrets, too, people who aren’t immediately obvious about who they are or where they’re from. The eel’s secretive side is also the secretive side of humans. And seeking your place in the world on your own: Surely that is, at the end of the day, the most universal of all human experiences?
OF COURSE, I’M ANTHROPOMORPHIZING THE EEL, FORCING IT TO BE more than it is or wishes to be, which may seem somewhat dubious. Attributing human characteristics to nonhuman creatures has been a common devic
e in, for example, literature: fairy tales and fables about anthropomorphized animals thinking, talking, and feeling, animals demonstrating morality and acting according to a set of values. It’s also common in religion. Divine beings are given human form and characteristics in order to render them fathomable. The Old Norse Aesir were gods in human guise. Jesus was the son of God, but also a human. Only by being both could he represent a link between the worldly and the divine and become the savior of humankind. At heart, what’s at stake is identification, the ability to see something familiar in the unfamiliar and thus comprehend it and feel closer to it. An artist painting a portrait always puts part of him- or herself in it.
But within science, anthropomorphism has never been accepted. Science claims to deal with unadulterated objectivity, the truth that reveals itself only under the microscope. It attempts to describe the world as it is, not as it seems. An eel is not a person and cannot, therefore, be likened to one. Anyone with an objective, empiricist approach to knowledge could not bring himself to speak of animals that way. To experience the world as human belongs to us alone.
But when Rachel Carson wrote about the eel, that was, nevertheless, what she did. She anthropomorphized it. She described the eel as a sentient creature with feelings, an animal with memory and reason, which could be tormented by the tribulations it was destined for or could enjoy the bright side of life. And she had her reasons for doing so. When the history of science is one day summed up, Rachel Carson will stand out as one of the people who contributed most to our understanding of not only the eel but also the vast and complex ecosystem to which it inevitably belongs.
Rachel Carson was one of the twentieth century’s most prominent and influential marine biologists. She was first and foremost an expert in the ocean and its inhabitants; she wrote several groundbreaking books about marine life and eventually also became a pioneer of and icon to the burgeoning environmental movement. She was an extraordinary person in many ways.
The Book of Eels Page 10